Renée Mauperin Reading Order

Renée Mauperin (1864) by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is their first wholly successful novel and the best introduction to their characteristic method — a study of the Mauperin family, with particular focus on the youngest daughter Renée, a girl of independent intelligence and unconventional spirit who is destroyed by the consequences of a casual remark she makes about her brother's fraudulent use of a noble family's name. Renée Mauperin is the Goncourts' most complex character: a young woman of 1864 who is by temperament and inclination unsuited to the social role of bourgeois daughter — she swims, she draws, she thinks and speaks without the conventional female self-censorship — and whose intelligence makes her both morally superior to the social system and entirely incapable of functioning within it. The novel is also the Goncourts' most technically accomplished in its management of scene: the seventeen chapters that constitute the book are a series of rendered scenes rather than narrated summaries, each carrying the story forward through dialogue and observed behavior rather than authorial commentary. Renée Mauperin is published in the same year as Germinie Lacerteux, but where Germinie is set in the working class, Renée Mauperin is set in the prosperous bourgeoisie — together they define the range of the Goncourt method.